Geraldine Brooks

Geraldine Brooks (born 1955) is an Australian-American journalist and author. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for March.

Early life and career

Brooks was born in October 1955 and grew up in the Western suburbs of Sydney, Australia. She attended the all-girls' Bethlehem College in Sydney, and then Sydney University. She later worked as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald. As the Greg Shackleton Memorial Scholar she completed a Master's Degree in journalism at Columbia University in New York City in 1983. Subsequently Brooks worked for The Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans — in 1990, for coverage of the Persian Gulf, Brooks (with Tony Horwitz) received the Overseas Press Club's Hal Boyle Award for "Best newspaper or wire service reporting from abroad".

Brooks was awarded a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University for 2006.

Brooks married fellow Pulitzer recipient, Tony Horwitz, in Tourette-sur-loup, France, in 1984. She also converted to Judaism, which is the religion of Tony Horwitz. They have a son, Nathaniel, and divide their time between homes in Martha's Vineyard, United States and Sydney, Australia.

Works

Her first book, Nine Parts of Desire (1994), based on her experiences among the Muslim women of the Middle East, was an international bestseller, translated into 17 languages. Foreign Correspondence (1997), which won the Nita Kibble Literary Award for women's writing, was a memoir and travel adventure about a childhood enriched by penpals from around the world, and her adult quest to find them.

Her first novel, Year of Wonders, published in 2001, is an international bestseller. Set in 1666, Year Of Wonders follows a young woman's battle to save her fellow villagers and her soul when the plague suddenly strikes the small Derbyshire village of Eyam.

Her second novel, March, was published in late February 2005. An historical novel set during the American Civil War, it chronicles the war experiences of the March girls' absent father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. The parallel novel was generally well received by the critics. In December 2005 March was selected by the Washington Post as one of the five best fiction works published during the year. In April 2006, the book earned Brooks the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

March seems to have had its roots in Brooks' childhood. A copy of Little Women was given to Brooks when she was only ten years old, by her mother Gloria, a journalist and radio announcer.

People of the Book, published in January 2008, is a fictionalised account of the history of the Sarajevo Haggadah.

Awards and nominations

• 2006: The Pulitzer Prize for March
• 2008: The Australian Publishers Association's Literary Fiction Book of the Year for People of the Book

Bibliography

• (1994). Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women. Doubleday. ISBN 0385475764.
• (1997). Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey From Down Under to All Over. Doubleday. ISBN 0385482698.
• (2001). Year of Wonders. Viking. ISBN 067091021X.
• (2005). March. Viking. ISBN 0670033359.
• (2008). People of the Book. Fourth Estate. ISBN 0007177437.

References

External links

• Geraldine Brooks official website
• Interview with [[Ramona Koval] on The Book Show, ABC Radio National, on her novel "People of the Book"]
• Interview between Geraldine Brooks and Kelly Hewittin which the author discusses her new novel People of the Book, winning the Pulitzer Prize, and her work as a journalist.
• A Muslim woman reviews 'Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women'
• A Muslim Response to: Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks
• Geraldine Brooks' Civil War 'March', NPR
• Book Page Interview by Trisha Ping, An Idealist at War, 2005
• 2008 interview on Littoral, the blog of the Key West Literary Seminar